Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2019]

[techuse]

From my memory it was at the high setting where crysis was far above other games visually. Especially shader quality, that was a big one.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I remember the thing would outright disable shadowmaps for the damn sun altogether.

Back then I used to disable shadows before I even started to play a game...always. Shadows just looked, not right and were far more distracting than any potential benefit they brought to my eyes. It's only been in the past 2-3 years that I've started selectively allowing shadows to be enabled in some games because they've gotten good enough in some games to not be a distraction to me.

So, that may be where we remember things differently.

Regards,
SB

 

[PSman1700]

Even on the lower settings Crysis looked better then most other titles, it also required more of the hardware then most other titles.

 

[Shortbread]

 

[Karamazov]

too bad i don't have a powerfull PC, because the inevitable VR mod coming for this game will be glorious.

 

[PSman1700]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...ilt-a-zen-2-navi-pc-to-next-gen-console-specs

The generational leap might be much larger then we think.
DF notes that the Q6600 is a 2008 cpu, which is actually a january 2007 cpu, derived from the faster Q6700/QX6700 november 2006 variants.
That means that by the time the PS4 and X one released they had ballpark 2006 mid tier kentsfield performance, which at the time of the consoles release, they were sporting 7 year old CPU performance, and that Q6600 wasn't even the fastest, with rather low clocks, it was the first budged quad core from intel.

By the end of 2020 the jaguar cpu will be as fast as a mid tier kentsfield from 2006, well yeah were obviously going to see the biggest leap in a console generation ever regarding pure CPU performance? Now a 8 core zen 2 @ 3.2 ghz boost looks very pleasing, while by the time of release it's mid-range by all means.

The GPU's in the 2013 consoles where essentially comparable to 1.5 year old mid range GPU's by the time of their release, offering half of the compute power of what was avaible at the time. They also still continued with old mechanical HDD's (thanks to SSD prices i assume).

Almost like if it all was intentional, i mean hardware progression was beginning to slow around that time and a PS5/Scarlett wouldn't have much of an performance increase, mid-gens only offering '4k'.

 

[Panino Manino]

offtopic, seeing leaked Death Stranding screens I'm on the team that says the terrain is more complex and impressive than Star Citizen.

well yeah were obviously going to see the biggest leap in a console generation ever regarding pure CPU performance?

This only a big deal because the last gen was a sideways improvement, we're just going back to "regular" updates (not considering Nintendo).
MIPS R3000 to EE was a big jump. EE to CELL was another big jump.
I can't see the next jump as being bigger than those, the most significant change is more the software side that became much more complex and can deliver much more.

 

[zed]

MIPS R3000 to EE was a big jump. EE to CELL was another big jump.

Yeah for PSman1700 to say the generation ps4->ps5 CPU improvement is gonna 'obviously going to see the biggest leap in a console generation ever' is hilarious, not only will it not be obviously the biggest its prolly gonna be in the bottom half of the table of console CPU improvements ever
Is there a table that lists all the Flops of consoles CPU's

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Is there a table that lists all the Flops of consoles CPU's

Would be silly anyway as when the biggest improvements in CPU performance happened, we didn't even count previous performance in FLOPS but in MIPS.

 

[see colon]

Then we disagree. If AMD's RT solution is like Nvidia's that would be an amazingly suspicious coincidence and from what Sony have said about the performance of their solid state tech, we know it's nothing like what exists on PC so it's likely exploiting bespoke console architecture. There is a reason that no amount of money can eliminate loading times on PC and that is the fundamental PC architecture itself, which is a collection of abstracted arbitrated buses that come with a collection of bottlenecks.

I'll believe the "no load times" claim when I see it. I'm sure there will be some games that are essentially load screen free, but I'm doubtful it will be essentially eliminated on for the entire generation. I mean, there were cart based games (SNES, N64) that had loading screens. Whatever bandwidth the hardware provides, developers will find a way to saturate it, or find another bottleneck.

Would be silly anyway as when the biggest improvements in CPU performance happened, we didn't even count previous performance in FLOPS but in MIPS.

You can't measure FLOP/S on processors that don't have FLOPs. Also, my vote for biggest CPU improvement is Master System to Genesis. Or maybe, Genesis to Saturn. Actually, it's probably Genesis to Saturn, because Saturn had a 68K plus the SH2's. Or maybe SNES to N64, because the SNES has a notoriously slow CPU, while 64 had the fastest of it's generation, so the gap is bigger.

 

[goonergaz]

I'll believe the "no load times" claim when I see it. I'm sure there will be some games that are essentially load screen free, but I'm doubtful it will be essentially eliminated on for the entire generation. I mean, there were cart based games (SNES, N64) that had loading screens. Whatever bandwidth the hardware provides, developers will find a way to saturate it, or find another bottleneck.

If it's 10x faster then 1 minute becomes 6 seconds, not many games are 1 minute to load so any loading will be minimal. I wonder also if even as you select a game it could begin 'background loading' it so even in that one second from highlighting a game to then selecting it loading time will be 'saved'.

 

[Jay]

Will probably define instant to be below 5 seconds or something like that.
I would like it to be 3 though.

What's a rough estimate to load 16GB from what we assume would be a mid estimate of what we're expecting ssd speed to be?

Note: not that I think you need to load all that to get into game menu, etc.

 

[see colon]

If it's 10x faster then 1 minute becomes 6 seconds, not many games are 1 minute to load so any loading will be minimal. I wonder also if even as you select a game it could begin 'background loading' it so even in that one second from highlighting a game to then selecting it loading time will be 'saved'.

That's all well and good, but from personal experience, load times don't scale linear with drive speed. For example, my desktop has 3 drives in it. I 240GB SSD boot drive, a 500GB M.2 that I install frequently used games, and a 4 TB mechanical drive that's 5400RPM. According to benchmarks, my SSDs are at least 5x faster than my slow mechanical drive. But I do occasionally load games off that slow drive, and it's slower, for sure, but I'd estimate that it's half as fast at best. So a 30 second loading screen is about minute off the HDD. It's noticeable, for sure, but it isn't anywhere near 1/5 the time when running off the M.2. Also, my mechanical drive is slower than the average PC drive, but on par with the drives in consoles (mine might have more cache), so the difference I notice is a bit more than what most PC gamers would notice.

 

[Jay]

@see colon this is what has been discussed in other threads. Your comparing a filesystem that's not optimized for ssd, system built around it also, etc.

 

[goonergaz]

That's all well and good, but from personal experience, load times don't scale linear with drive speed. For example, my desktop has 3 drives in it. I 240GB SSD boot drive, a 500GB M.2 that I install frequently used games, and a 4 TB mechanical drive that's 5400RPM. According to benchmarks, my SSDs are at least 5x faster than my slow mechanical drive. But I do occasionally load games off that slow drive, and it's slower, for sure, but I'd estimate that it's half as fast at best. So a 30 second loading screen is about minute off the HDD. It's noticeable, for sure, but it isn't anywhere near 1/5 the time when running off the M.2. Also, my mechanical drive is slower than the average PC drive, but on par with the drives in consoles (mine might have more cache), so the difference I notice is a bit more than what most PC gamers would notice.

as @Jay says, it’s apples to oranges...they certainly wouldn’t be touting no loading if it wasn’t going to be close enough to no loading. Sure some of that may be a bit of trickery but who cares?

 

[PSman1700]

That's all well and good, but from personal experience, load times don't scale linear with drive speed. For example, my desktop has 3 drives in it. I 240GB SSD boot drive, a 500GB M.2 that I install frequently used games, and a 4 TB mechanical drive that's 5400RPM. According to benchmarks, my SSDs are at least 5x faster than my slow mechanical drive. But I do occasionally load games off that slow drive, and it's slower, for sure, but I'd estimate that it's half as fast at best. So a 30 second loading screen is about minute off the HDD. It's noticeable, for sure, but it isn't anywhere near 1/5 the time when running off the M.2. Also, my mechanical drive is slower than the average PC drive, but on par with the drives in consoles (mine might have more cache), so the difference I notice is a bit more than what most PC gamers would notice.

Try star citizen, loads 11 times faster on a zippy nvme ssd, and lets you stream the massive environments without stutter, fast travel etc. Games need to be designed around SSD's in order to notice a big difference. Drawback is that hdd users get a subpar experience if anything at all.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

That's all well and good, but from personal experience, load times don't scale linear with drive speed. For example, my desktop has 3 drives in it. I 240GB SSD boot drive, a 500GB M.2 that I install frequently used games, and a 4 TB mechanical drive that's 5400RPM. According to benchmarks, my SSDs are at least 5x faster than my slow mechanical drive. But I do occasionally load games off that slow drive, and it's slower, for sure, but I'd estimate that it's half as fast at best. So a 30 second loading screen is about minute off the HDD. It's noticeable, for sure, but it isn't anywhere near 1/5 the time when running off the M.2. Also, my mechanical drive is slower than the average PC drive, but on par with the drives in consoles (mine might have more cache), so the difference I notice is a bit more than what most PC gamers would notice.

As said above, there's been a good deal of interesting discussion in other threads regarding this.

I don't know if you've read it or not, but if you haven't, I'd recommend you check:
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/next-gen-console-versus-pc-comparison-spawn.61408/

 

[see colon]

as @Jay says, it’s apples to oranges...they certainly wouldn’t be touting no loading if it wasn’t going to be close enough to no loading. Sure some of that may be a bit of trickery but who cares?

Has Sony ever made claims about their console hardware pre-launch that haven't quite ended up being true?

And to everyone else telling me to check out Star Citizen and claiming that games will be SSD optimized... Yeah, I'm sure some will. But I'm willing to bet that many won't. I mean, look how many games we got this generation that don't run particularly well on consoles. Optimizing for multiple platforms isn't trivial, and as long as it's "good enough" I'm sure games will ship despite not taking advantage of console specific features.

I mean, if I rewound time to 2013 and we were having this conversation about how ESRAM is a huge advantage for XBONE over PC because it technically is, right. 200GB/s is better than the GTX 680 had at the time, and it wasn't just for graphics! But alas... We all know how that turned out.

All I'm saying is that I don't expect the lack of loading claim to remain true by the end of the generation, because even if developers properly leverage the SSD/File System/Secret Sauce, the deeper you get into a generation the more developers try to get from the hardware, and that bandwidth will get pushed to the limit.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

All I'm saying is that I don't expect the lack of loading claim to remain true by the end of the generation, because even if developers properly leverage the SSD/File System/Secret Sauce, the deeper you get into a generation the more developers try to get from the hardware, and that bandwidth will get pushed to the limit.

The longest load time you could get should be time to populate all the RAM. If 24 GBs (high ball) and 5 GB/s transfer speed (medium prediction) that'll be 5 seconds. Seek times add considerably to that when trying to load off HDDs, but these are tiny with SSD and a bespoke filesystem (we hope!). So the only other thing that could slow you down would be decompressing assets which shouldn't be used (aggressive packing is used for the download, which is unpacked to hardware friendly formats).

There's nothing for the devs to 'get more' out of the hardware that could slow this down. Things that slow down loading from HDD just won't impact an SSD system. What could they be wanting to do to take 1 minute getting a game off a 5 GB/s drive? Hell, that'd be 300 GB of data which is larger than the entire game!

 

[PSman1700]

And to everyone else telling me to check out Star Citizen and claiming that games will be SSD optimized... Yeah, I'm sure some will.

You will have to wait untill next-gen before games start to use SSD storage to their advantage. Right now it's an unfinished game (SC) taking advantage of it, that's it. I guess more and more will after the consoles catch up with SSD (and other hardware) next year.

Has Sony ever made claims about their console hardware pre-launch that haven't quite ended up being true?

Depends on context, they claim 8k, 120hz, RT, and zero loading. All this will certainly be possible, how complex the games are then is another thing though. Pre-launch hype is important and many will believe it and spread hype, basically free advertising

With the PS3 though, didn't they say something about dual 1080p output at 120fps, or something like that? 720p 30fps was the truth. Can't find anything related to it, just a forum post.

https://www.gamespot.com/forums/sys...pers-find-the-true-power-of-the-cel-25389649/

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/news311005ps3120

From eurogamer 2005 The tech was kinda outdated when it arrived and 120fps sure was possible but not really realistic.

''the PS3 to be ready to make the best of the technology once it finally arrives.''

''the PlayStation 3 will run games at an unprecedented (and perhaps rather pointless) 120 frames per second.''

All I'm saying is that I don't expect the lack of loading claim to remain true by the end of the generation, because even if developers properly leverage the SSD/File System/Secret Sauce, the deeper you get into a generation the more developers try to get from the hardware, and that bandwidth will get pushed to the limit.

SSD's are going to be an advantage in general, some games making better use of it then others.